ABSTRACT
In his introductory text, Weaponising Architecture, Graham Cairns frames the Capitol Riot of January 6, 2021 in the United States within the populist political phenomenon of ‘culture wars’. He thus connects the appropriation of architecture for political ends – violent and otherwise – with various sites of contestation between opposing political world (or nation) views: religion, history, anthropology, science, the curricula of schools, political and human rights, and whole array of symbolic cultural artefacts. In exploring the nomenclature of ‘culture war’ in this context, he opens the possibility of defining the tools of these wars as their cultural weapons, architecture included.
Specifically with an eye on the 2024 US Presidential election, he asks whether what we witnessed in 2021 represents a step on a road to greater violence that potentially threatens to become integral to the mechanics of US democracy: through the intimidation of voters at polling stations, the forcible occupation of streets, the targeting of activists in their homes, the ransacking of the architectural icons of the political system, and more. Weaponising Architecture thus opens the question of what role there will be for violence – and its architectural sites and objects – in 2024 and in the foreseeable future, both in the United States and beyond its borders.
